Tag: Masato Furuoya

“In this decadent age, who believes in the gods’ anger?” asks a cynical priest, willingly inviting evil into his home in the hope of brokering a change in his constraining circumstances. A key figure of the avant garde, Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, like many of his contemporaries, struggled in the heavily commercialised cinema industry of the 1970s and beyond, finding the international arena more receptive to his arthouse concerns. 1988’s Wuthering Heights (嵐が丘, Arashi ga Oka), a distinctly Japanese take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel, found funding in France where it perhaps neatly sits alongside superficially similar efforts from his similarly constrained contemporaries, but as always Yoshida’s vision is darker, more disturbing than that of the big budget epics which aimed to recapture golden age glories.

Yoshida swaps the desolate Yorkshire moors for a smokey hellscape settled in ash on the side of an unpredictable volcano. The Yamabes are a priestly family in charge of conducting various rituals to keep the serpent god happy, preventing an eruption and ensuring good rains. The house is spilt in two with a feud underway between the East mansion and the West. The East mansion is where we lay our scene as old Yamabe returns from an extended sojourn in the city, bringing back with him a feral child he found starving under a bridge and later names “Onimaru” (Yûsaku Matsuda) in honour of his “demonic” appearance.

“Demonic” maybe an unkind word to use about any child and primed to become a self-fulling prophecy, but as someone later puts it Onimaru “does not belong to this world”. He is “an evil man” whose “cruelty knows no limits”, yet two women are drawn into his orbit and find themselves unable to break free of his passionate intensity. His step-sister, Kinu (Yuko Tanaka), our Cathy stand-in, bonds with him in childhood feeling a kind of elemental connection perhaps forbidden to her as a woman of feudal Japan subject to the whims of male society. Yet she alone sees through him to humanity buried below, “your curse is the proof you will never stop loving me” she offers darkly while seducing him the night before her marriage to another man (Tatsuo Nadaka). Later that man’s sister (Eri Ishida), positioning herself as potential bride, cites the fact that he is “consumed by jealousy” as further proof that he is more man than demon, but Onimaru himself seems uncertain so deep is he in rage and resentment.

That resentment is perhaps as much about class as about anything else. A feral child, living like an animal on the streets of an unforgiving city, he’s an ill fit for the rarefied mansion of a local lord with a spiritual mission, albeit one which imprisons him in his home and forbids him from associating with the world below. Yamabe took him in for his “boldness”, actively seeking his demonic dynamism while his own son, Hidemaru (Nagare Hagiwara), remains disappointingly conservative and wedded to his old-fashioned elite entitlement. Hidemaru’s resentment of Onimaru is not so much born of parental rejection in his father’s abrupt decision to go out and find a more satisfactory son than the one dutifully waiting at home, but irritation in Onimaru’s irregular status. He resents that a mere “peasant”, a man who should be among the servants, is permitted to share his space, and it seems, has usurped his position in his father’s eyes to be groomed as an heir to the illustrious Yamabe name.

Hidemaru eventually leaves in disgust, setting off to make a conventionally successful life for himself in the city, latterly returning with a wife and son to claim his birthright only after his father’s death. Yet Hidemaru suffers too. His wife is raped and murdered by bandits, agents of chaos and yet a product of the system he was so keen to uphold, leaving him a drunken, dissolute figure unable to fulfil his obligations to the god of fire while Onimaru prospers in a violent world and is eventually gifted that which he most wanted – stewardship of the Yamabe clan.

Even so, he cannot fully possess Kinu who remains lost to him, ruined by her own internal conflict between individualism and obedience. After coming of age, her father tells her women of the Yamabe clan must leave the mountain to serve as priestesses in the shrine, but Kinu wants to “live as a true woman”. She cannot have Onimaru, but does not want to leave him so she engineers a marriage with the rival West mansion and the kindly Mitsuhiko who brands his house as one of light as opposed to the gloomy shadows of the East. Kinu has attempted to seize her own future, at least in part, but finds herself conflicted, torn between her affection for Mitsuhiko who is gentleness personified and her need for Onimaru’s brooding intensity.

Yet Yoshida’s Wuthering Heights is less a story of forbidden, transgressive loves than it is of elemental destruction, the anger of the gods manifested as imploded repression and its fiery aftermath. Yamabe, the father figure, brings “evil” into his home, infecting it with dark desire and deep resentments seemingly in the knowledge it will burn it to the ground. The third generation, orphaned and finally independent, are left to make what restitution they can and so the tale begins to reset and repeat with cousins, Hidemaru’s grown and now subjugated son Yoshimaru (Masato Furuoya), and Kinu’s fiesty daughter (Tomoko Takabe), returning their ire to the force of their oppression – Onimaru, still fearsome and implacable though ageing and maddened by his unanswerable love for a dead woman whose corpse he has begun to covet.

Kinu, on her deathbed, promised to drag Onimaru to hell (assuming they weren’t already there) if only to protect her new family and finally does just that as he finds himself expelled by the next generation, dragging a coffin off into the fiery distance. “In every way, our world is accursed” insists an exasperated retainer. Everything here is corrupt, rotten, suppurating under the weight of oppressive traditions which restrict freedom and insist on order at the price of humanity. Yoshida’s noh-inspired aesthetics add to the atmosphere of fable as his embattled protagonists attempt to reconcile their natures with their civility but find there is no answer for repressed desire other than destruction and eventual rebirth.

Haruki Kadokawa dominated much of mainstream 1980s cinema with his all encompassing media empire perpetuated by a constant cycle of movies, books, and songs all used to sell the other. 1984’s Someday, Someone Will be Killed (いつか誰かが殺される, Itsuka Dareka ga Korosareru) is another in this familiar pattern adapting the Kadokawa teen novel by Jiro Akagawa and starring lesser idol Noriko Watanabe in one of her rare leading performances in which she also sings the similarly titled theme song. The third film from Korean/Japanese director Yoichi Sai, Someday, Someone Will be Killed is an impressive mix of everything which makes the world Kadokawa idol movies so enticing as the heroine finds herself unexpectedly at the centre of an ongoing international conspiracy protected only by a selection of underground drop outs but faces her adversity with typical perkiness and determination safe in the knowledge that nothing really all that bad is going to happen.

The film opens with a strange, often forgotten subplot as an eccentric elderly lady, apparently loathed by her children who are taking bets on when she will die, celebrates her birthday by announcing a new game – taking the first syllables of her children’s names she comes up with that of our heroine – Atsuko Moriya (Noriko Watanabe), whom she intends to invite to her party. Approaching the end of high school, Atsuko is an ordinary girl of the time which is to say her interests are studying, shopping, and boys. Her father is a reporter for a newspaper who is often away but has returned to take her on a rare shopping trip. Revealing that he was actually born abroad, her father slips a floppy disc into her handbag and disappears after going to make a phonecall while Atsuko is occupied in the fitting room. Striking up a friendship with the store assistant, Cola (Masato Furuoya), Atsuko is taken in by a collection of fake fashion peddling drop outs from society while she tries to work out what’s going on with her dad and what she’s supposed to do with the much sought after floppy disk.

Like many a Kadokawa heroine, Atsuko is quickly plunged into a dark and complicated world she is ill equipped to understand but in keeping with the nature of the genre the atmosphere is largely dictated by her typically teenage outlook. Despite the increasingly high stakes, the film remains bright and cheerful as Atsuko continues in her quest without fear or danger. Her main allies are a computer nerd (Toshinori Omi) who has such a crush on her he’s created his own 8-bit Atsuko operating system complete with palm reader door lock for his base of operations, and the guys from the fashion store who, it transpires, are a gang of counterfeiting squatters. A thoroughly middle class girl, Atsuko reacts negatively to her new found friends and their unusual domestic arrangements but quickly warms to them as they show her nothing but kindness and acceptance, even risking their own existence in an attempt to help her uncover the circumstances surrounding her father’s disappearance.

Fathers become something of a running theme as Atsuko’s solid relationship with hers is contrasted both with Cola’s disconnection from his family and his new found role as a kind of surrogate father for a little girl at the commune. Later the same theme resurfaces as Atsuko uncovers the truth behind her father’s birth which explains the dreams she often has of a bright red sun setting over a wide river. These circumstances are echoed in the strange atmosphere of the mansion at which the film begins as its eccentric, regency dressing older lady engages with her seemingly resentful children in a cold and severe manner. An insert song playing as Atsuko and Cola take a drive wonders what the point of family is, but Atsuko’s concern is less than with the nature of familial bonds than with her own identity as filtered through that of her father and her discoveries of his apparently mysterious birth and career. Thus her final decision becomes one which sets her on a course of growing up in a quest for self knowledge and the creation of an identity which is both of her own making and takes into account her new found family history.

Making room for a musical sequence in which Atsuko picks up a guitar and embarks on a rendition of Summertime as well a few insert songs alongside the title track, Someday, Someone Will be Killed is pure Kadokawa idol movie but Sai makes sure to up the stakes with some genuinely exciting action sequences and mounting tension as Atsuko finds herself in way over her head. Of course there are a few comic moments too including the unfortunate detective charged with locating Atsuko to give her the invitation to the old lady’s ball who often finds himself beaten up by mistake by one side or the other. Very much of its time with its cold war paranoia coupled with up to the minute technology, Someday, Someone Will be Killed is among the darker of the idol dramas Kadokawa had to offer but nevertheless remains rosy and innocent in terms of outlook right up until Atsuko takes off on her motorbike in search of the woman she’ll eventually become.